Trump’s Voters Are More Sophisticated Than You Think

But their mindless acceptance of his bigotry is unforgivable.

March 11, 2016

Imagine the perfect progressive U.S. presidential candidate:
She is promising single-payer healthcare and free college, and has a way to
actually make these things happen. She’s plugged in on environmental issues,
and will drastically reduce income inequality. She’s pristine on gun control
and reproductive rights. She knew going into Iraq was a mistake. She has no
skeletons in her closet. She can offer you—yes, you—a better life.

You’d vote for her in a heartbeat. Except there’s one little
thing: She’s just not really into people of Finnish descent. At all. She thinks
they’re too blond; and also, Finland’s
kind of close to Russia. “Helsinki” sounds like it begins with ‘hell’! No, there’s no good reason for her prejudice. It’s
just her thing.

My question, then, isn’t whether you’d vote for such a
person—I’d like to think you would not. Rather, it’s what you’d make of the
fact that others would vote for her, despite her obvious bigotry. Let’s say
this candidate was winning primaries across the country. Would you conclude that
Americans sure do hate Finnish people? Or would it more be that Americans (that
is, the non-Finnish ones) could overlook anti-Finnish-ism if it happened to
appear on an otherwise appealing platform?

In the Guardian,
Thomas Frank makes an altogether convincing case that Trump’s supporters, thought to be motivated
by rabid bigotry, are actually a bit more complex than that:

When members of the professional class wish to
understand the working-class Other, they traditionally consult experts on the
subject. And when these authorities are asked to explain the Trump movement,
they always seem to zero in on one main accusation: bigotry. Only racism, they
tell us, is capable of powering a movement like Trump’s, which is blowing
through the inherited structure of the Republican party like a tornado through
a cluster of McMansions.

Frank
doesn’t dispute that Trump is running on a platform that includes overt
bigotry, nor that members of Team Overt Bigotry in today’s culture wars prefer
Trump as a candidate. The nuanceFrank
brings to the discussion is that Trump’s supporters aren’t the racist bumpkins
they’ve been caricatured as in the press, but are in fact a thoughtful and
informed portion of the electorate, and one that has been disproportionately
impacted by free-trade deals that Trump opposes. Frank writes that he “noticed something
surprising” in Trump’s rhetoric:

In each of the speeches I watched,
Trump spent a good part of his time talking about an entirely legitimate issue,
one that could even be called leftwing. Yes, Donald Trump talked about trade. In
fact, to judge by how much time he spent talking about it, trade may be his
single biggest concern—not white supremacy.

Frank
is right that there are understandable reasons why a working-class white person
might support portions of Trump’s platform, as it is. This doesn’t mean Trump
is the real progressive or something
like that, but it means that he’s picked up on certain concerns that some other
candidates have not. Free trade is bound to sound different to someone whose
job was moved overseas than to someone whose skills and qualifications make
them a natural fit at the top of this economy. This doesn’t quite get at why
someone would favor Trump over Sanders. But it explains
why a Republican might prefer Trump. And Frank’s very right to call out that cringe-inducing Kristof column, in which Kristof
‘debates’ a folksy Trump voter of his own feverish invention.

But honestly it’s enough that voters are
willing to overlook overt
bigotry. Being OK with an openly racist and sexist candidate, with one who has
actually built bigotry into his platform, is itself a statement about the
bounds of acceptability. The rabid-racism question is irrelevant.

OK, fine,
it’s not entirely irrelevant. It’s
just hard to get too worked up about people who are fine with bigotry—as long
as they get everything else they’re promised—being maligned as enthusiastic
bigots rather that the passive bigots they are; the people, in other words, for
whom maintaining white supremacy is only the tenth most
important political issue, and the first nine are fantastic and thought through. But really, who cares? Nuanced bigotry
is still bigotry.

Let’s
return to our otherwise flawless
anti-Finnish candidate. On some level, one would have to be more understanding
of the people who support her due to their own struggles. Let’s say you really need free college, free
healthcare, and here’s someone offering what you need… but with a side of
ugh-Finnish-people. But this is explain-but-not-excuse territory. It has to be, or else the thing you’re
supporting really does wind up being… fascism. Which,
historically, tends not to go so great—not for the proverbial Finnish, not for
opponents of the regime, and, indeed, not for anyone in the nation, once
(ideally) non-fascist forces (I’m picturing Trudeau armed with baby pandas)
swoop in and remove the fascist regime.

I’ve
argued that there’s a “myth of pretext-free
anti-Semitism,” by which I mean there’s a myth that back in the
day, Jews were hated only for religious-minority status, for being downtrodden, when in reality anti-Semitism has basically always been about the
construction of Jew-as-oppressor. Frank’s piece makes me think there’s also a
myth of pretext-free fascism. Because if you go by some
super-caricatured version of what “fascism” entails, which pretty much amounts to voting Republican, saying racist and misogynist things
under the guise of telling it like it is, and dressing like a budget-less Alex
P. Keaton, then it’s shocking and nuanced and contradictory and worthy of note
when a fascist politician brings in elements of the left and the right. But in
fact, it’s none of those things, because this is how it went before. As
Zeev Sternhell explained in his 1983 book, translated from French as Neither Right nor Left: Fascist Ideology in
France, fascism has roots on the left as well as the right. While this doesn’t
mean one needs to go
overboard and conflate socialism with National Socialism, it’s still
important to remember that elements of progressive platforms are, in fascism,
fused with anti-modernity and reactionary politics. The colloquial use of
“fascism” to mean “really, really conservative” thus seems to throw people
off.

While I do highly recommend reading Sternhell, the book’s
essential idea (well, the one relevant for our purpose here) is also found in Rick Perlstein’s
recent In These Times piece about fascism and
populism: “Every fascist achieves and cements his power by pledging to
rescue ordinary people from the depredations of economic elites. That’s how
fascism works.”

Perlstein—who also, crucially, notes “that Mexicans and Syrians
are also ‘ordinary people’ who struggle in the modern economy,” spells this out
(emphasis Perlstein’s):

Under fascism, economic protection for
the goose accompanies dispossession of the gander. White people prosper in
part because minorities
suffer—whether, under Hitler, by taking away property from Jews, or as Herr Trump expects, by taking back ‘our’
jobs from ‘them,’ whether the them is
immigrants or our supposedly duplicitous trading partners.

Ultimately,
whether a Trump supporter came for the bigotry and stayed for the
trade-critique or vice versa is not all that important. And it’s that much lesscentral when you factor in the extent
to which the promised utopia is posited as dependingon the oppression of one or more disfavored groups.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a writer living in New York. Her book, The Perils of ‘Privilege,’ will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.